F.A.T. Roundtable Discussion: Unbuilt Matter with Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou and Herzog & de Meuron
6 PM
/// Update (January 12): The event is booked out ///
As part of the exhibition ‘What If – Unbuilt Architecture in Switzerland’ at the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM), Marco Zelli, of the Zurich-based collective Forum for Architecture Theory (F.A.T.), is moderating a round-table discussion with Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou and Jacques Herzog on the topic ‘Unbuilt Matter’.
Architecture History displays an intense dialectic between what comes to being and what remains on paper, constantly questioning the boundaries of the discipline and its conditions of being.
The Unbuilt can be the premise to explore an unprecedented field of freedom and experimentation or the unfortunate result of conditions that didn’t allow for the realization of an idea. In both cases, the condition of not being built yet defines per se a condition of potential, A fertile ground for multiple determinations, unearthing, and reincarnations. Unbuilt could be hence considered a sort of antimatter of the built, and as such a matter in itself, with its agency: it defines the Built per via negativa but it also constantly negotiates with it.
The debate will explore the subjects of the unbuilt and its agencies through the lens offered by two different texts selected by the two guests.
Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou proposes the storyboard ‘Life or the image of truly modern Architecture / Supersurface, an alternative model of life on Earth’, produced for the eponymous movie ‘Vita/Supersuperficie’ on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Italy: the New Domestic Landscape’ exhibition curated by Emilio Ambasz at MoMA in 1972 in New York. This text consciously embraces the notion of unbuilt as a tool for speculation and depicts the project as something capable of designing the entirety of the space, on the ground of a priori approach.
Herzog & De Meuron selected the text ‘Eine Stadt im Werden?’ (English Title ‘A Nascent City?’): an urban study made by the office itself and Rémy Zaug in 1991/92. In this this written project for the city of Basel the authors momentarily suspended ‘all the building regulations and zoning plans’ to look at the city with the eyes of ‘strangers, observing and wondering…’ This suspension becomes the premise to interrogate the physical nature of the city, its infrastructural system, and ultimately its geography, to formulate possible stories of the city, and multiple conjectures about its ‘becoming’.
Together with Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou and Jacques Herzog we will explore the underground life of unbuilt architectural ideas and their capacity to influence both built architecture and architectural discourse precisely on the grounds of their ‘not have been realized”, navigating between the paradigm given by the two selected texts.
Registered participants will receive the texts per email prior to the event.
Date/Time: Wednesday, January 24, 2024, 6PM
Location: Jacques Herzog und Pierre de Meuron Kabinett, Basel
Language: English
Mandatory Registration: Please write to event@sam-basel.org with full name and contact email
Duration: Approx. 2/3 hours
Collage: New Babylon (collage), Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, 1956-1974.
